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Or you could consider that 140million Japanese (not sure about other countries) have been using emoji every day for the last 10+ years on their cellphones. The

Or you could consider that 140million Japanese (not sure about other countries) have been using emoji every day for the last 10+ years on their cellphones. They've become part of the language and it would be culturally insensitive to give them a big "fuck you, us westerner's don't need your damn icons, either keep those to yourself and hence don't be able to inter-operate with everyone else or stop using them even though they've been a big part of your culture for 10+ years"

sk5t 15y ago
Should every fad or handset feature adopted by 2% or more of the global population be incorporated into Unicode?
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Sort of. Unicode is designed to unify all character sets, eventually. 2% of the world's population using a character set (granted, not traditional characters here but it still counts) is enough.
jerf 15y ago
You're trying to make me feel bad, but you're doing it with a false dilemma: Either we stick emoji in Unicode or the Japanese are screwed and we told them to "fuck" off. This is a false dilemma, and exactly the sort of thinking that worries me as we fuzzily expand the charter of Unicode beyond a universal grapheme repository. I say there's plenty of third options, many of which are better choices than jamming it into the international all-purpose standard. Unicode is supposed to be the central hub for all graphemes, but I would certainly like to see some argument that emoji are actually graphemes. For one thing it's quite bizarre that suddenly Unicode appears to be specifying colors as well as shapes, which is one bright line I'd be concerned about. (There may have been colors before but they would be much more exceptional, and I'm not aware of any.) Unicode was ambitious as the all-grapheme repository, it's simply a guaranteed failure if it tries to become the repository of all vaguely iconic/smilyish/little pictures in the world.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  Japanese do mix emoji with kanji and kana. Are emoji any less graphemes than the mor pictographic han characters? I don't think the colors are normative though, any more than the exact shape is. A different representation of a love hotel ought to be fine.
  - jerf 15y ago
    The colors I'm referring to are the ones in the names of the code points, such as the ones the Germans complained about It doesn't get much more normative than that.
    - aidenn0 15y ago
      Ah, that grapheme doesn't actually have color IIRC, but the hair is not filled, thus giving the impression of a fair-haired person (rather than dark haired)

sk5t 15y ago

Should every fad or handset feature adopted by 2% or more of the global population be incorporated into Unicode?

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Sort of. Unicode is designed to unify all character sets, eventually. 2% of the world's population using a character set (granted, not traditional characters here but it still counts) is enough.

jerf 15y ago

You're trying to make me feel bad, but you're doing it with a false dilemma: Either we stick emoji in Unicode or the Japanese are screwed and we told them to "fuck" off. This is a false dilemma, and exactly the sort of thinking that worries me as we fuzzily expand the charter of Unicode beyond a universal grapheme repository. I say there's plenty of third options, many of which are better choices than jamming it into the international all-purpose standard. Unicode is supposed to be the central hub for all graphemes, but I would certainly like to see some argument that emoji are actually graphemes. For one thing it's quite bizarre that suddenly Unicode appears to be specifying colors as well as shapes, which is one bright line I'd be concerned about. (There may have been colors before but they would be much more exceptional, and I'm not aware of any.) Unicode was ambitious as the all-grapheme repository, it's simply a guaranteed failure if it tries to become the repository of all vaguely iconic/smilyish/little pictures in the world.

aidenn0 15y ago
Japanese do mix emoji with kanji and kana. Are emoji any less graphemes than the mor pictographic han characters? I don't think the colors are normative though, any more than the exact shape is. A different representation of a love hotel ought to be fine.
- jerf 15y ago
  The colors I'm referring to are the ones in the names of the code points, such as the ones the Germans complained about It doesn't get much more normative than that.
  - aidenn0 15y ago
    Ah, that grapheme doesn't actually have color IIRC, but the hair is not filled, thus giving the impression of a fair-haired person (rather than dark haired)